The moral faults of the church only reflected those of the nation. It was a hard and selfish generation which witnessed the Wars of the Roses and the dictatorship of Edward IV. The iniquitous French war, thirty years of plunder and demoralization, had corrupted the minds of the governing classes before the civil strife began. Afterwards the constant and easy changes of allegiance, as one faction or the other was in the ascendant, the wholesale confiscations and attainders, the never-ending executions, the sudden prosperity of adventurers, the premium on time-serving and intrigue, sufficed to make the whole nation cynical and sordid. The claim of the Yorkists to represent constitutional opposition to misgovernment became a mere hypocrisy. The claim of the Lancastrians to represent loyalty soon grew almost as hollow. Edward IV. with his combination of vicious self-indulgence and spasmodic cruelty was no unfit representative of his age. The _Paston Letters_, that unique collection of the private correspondence of a typical family of _nouveaux riches_, thriftless, pushing, unscrupulous, give us the true picture of the time. All that can be said in favour of the Yorkists is that they restored a certain measure of national prosperity, and that their leaders had one redeeming virtue in their addiction to literature. The learning which had died out in monasteries began to flourish again in the corrupt soil of the court. Most of Edward's favourites had literary tastes. His constable Tiptoft, the "butcher earl" of Worcester, was a figure who might have stepped out of the Italian Renaissance. A graduate of Pavia, a learned lawyer, who translated Caesar and Cicero, composed works both in Latin and English, and habitually impaled his victims, he was a man of a type hitherto unknown in England. Antony, Lord Rivers, the queen's brother, was a mere adventurer, but a poet of some merit, and a great patron of Caxton. Hastings, the Bourchiers, and other of the king's friends were minor patrons of literature. It is curious to find that Caxton, an honest man, and an enthusiast as to the future of the art of printing, which he had introduced into England, waxes enthusiastic as to the merits of the intelligent but unscrupulous peers who took an interest in his endeavours. Of the detestable Tiptoft he writes that "there flowered in virtue and cunning none like him among the lords of the temporalty in science and moral virtue"! And this is no time-serving praise of a patron, but disinterested tribute to a man who had perished long before on the scaffold. Death of Edward IV. Richard, duke of Gloucester.